So you've decided to hire Caroline Ellison. How should you announce it?

Published on October 8, 2026 9:56 PM GMT Two days after announcing that Caroline Ellison had joined Manifund, Austin Chen asked CEA's community health team to 'please let me know if there are things you believe I should do moving forward to mitigate this impact.' I attempt to answer this question, albeit put slightly differently: if you'd been responsible for implementing this decision, what should you do before it's published? I'll get my view on the decision itself out of the way first, because it'd be odd to pretend I don't have one. I think it was a bad call. Zachary Robinson's comment makes the principled case better than I could, and Julia Wise puts it more succinctly: 'don't hire someone with a fraud conviction for a finance or philanthropy role.' So I'll add only the practical one, which I don't think has been talked about: it's just not worth the hassle. Caroline Ellison is one person. Austin says he hired her because she was an excellent candidate, and I believe he believes that. But is she so exceptional that nobody else could have done the job? And is she worth all the ensuing very public drama and ostracisation? In my eyes, absolutely not. But I work in operations, and in ops you regularly get handed decisions you'd never have made yourself. Your job then is to make them succeed, or at least soften their crash landing. So this post is an ops exercise: you're the Head of Ops or Chief of Staff at your org, your founder/CEO has made this call, and you get the Slack message about it. What do you do? Alex, this exercise is silly, why are you bothering? This might seem like putting lipstick on a pig. If the decision is wrong, a better rollout doesn't make it right, and I think that's true. Much of the fallout would've likely happened anyway, particularly because some folks believe a hard red line has been crossed (e.g. a recent fraud conviction would disqualify someone from a finance role at CEA). But the aim of a good rollout isn't to neutralise the harm, it's to minimise it: to mitigate the risks to the organisation, its partners, the people who now have to explain to their own funders why they once used Manifund, and to Caroline herself. And I'd argue that the way the decision was rolled out also did a fair amount of damage, and Austin seems to half-agree. On 5 October he tweeted: 'perhaps I really botched the writeup.' He also seems, a month on, to be doing several of the things below in reverse order: circulating a private letter to explain himself, running a poll, and considering a large personal donation to settle the $500k FTX lawsuit. Those are all reasonable moves. They'd just have been worth a lot more before the announcement than after it. Finally, a caveat: this post isn't about how the decision to hire could've been better evidenced or reasoned (e.g. open round, modelling, strict criteria), but rather how the resulting implementation and announcement of that decision left a lot of value on the table. Anyway, time to be a general after the war. Here's what I would've done. Step 0: Disagree on the record, then set the conditions for reversal Before doing anything, tell your CEO plainly and in writing why you think it's the wrong call. This is what disagree-and-commit is for, and it gives the decision-maker one real last chance to reconsider before anything is locked in. If things go tits up, your concerns will be documented. Then, assuming your CEO is still set on it, I'd do a pre-mortem and agree in advance on the set of conditions that would trigger a reversal of the decision (or at least, further mitigating actions). For example, if specific partner organisations publicly withdraw, or if a set share of balances leaves the platform within three months. Deciding the threshold before the backlash starts matters, because once you're in the middle of the storm you at least have a break-glass plan, which lowers the cognitive load in the moment and makes it easier to overcome sunk costs. Step 1: Keep the trial internal, then announce on day one If a hire is controversial enough that you're tempted to give them a pseudonym, that's your signal. You wouldn't give any other new hire one, so the urge is telling you how people will react. The answer is to prepare for that reaction, not to delay it. The legitimate worry behind a pseudonym is the one Caroline herself gave: she didn't want a public announcement during a work trial, only to be let go a month later. That's fair, and there's a better way to handle it. Scope the trial so that nobody outside the organisation needs to know who's doing it: internal projects only, no customer support, no published writing under the organisation's name. Trialists don't need to face the public anyway, and if you think that's necessary, you've underthought the trial. Then, if the trial converts, announce on the person's first day as a staff member, alongside everything in Steps 2 to 4, not a month later. You could consider announcing a few days prior to their s